Cursive Handwriting for Beginners

1. Introduction Video: In this day and age of hyper fast-paced life, writing things down like we used to in generations past helps us slow down and ponder. There's something deeply personal from knowing that every word, every letter that to the stroke is unique to you and came from your hand in that moment. In some ways, it carries your thoughts, hopes, and the present moment. Hi, my name is Hans, I'm a property investor and content creator. So growing up, I've always been fascinated by history and tradition and in particular, calligraphy, which is a lost art nowadays, few years ago, I decided to go on this journey to take my handwriting a lot more seriously is made the process so much more enjoyable for me, from writing out random ideas to writing out my favorite quotes to pen pals. And it's no exaggeration to say, it's changed my life for the better. So in this class, I'll be showing you the things I've learned along my journey. I've created all the best bits and I've distilled everything here. We're going to include techniques from literally 100 year old manuscripts I've come across. It goes back to a time when literally your job prospects depend on the quality and speed of your handwriting. We're going to start right from the beginning. We're going to look at the correct way to hold your pen. We're going to go right back to basics and learn about what muscular movement is. So instead of writing half a page and getting finger cramps, if you wanted to, you could literally write for hours on end with no tiredness or no pain. How to write faster and more legibly. At the same time, we were learning a cursive script in this class, there'll be plenty of resources for you throughout this class, I've made you a series of worksheets to help you guide you through the entire process. And also there'll be a fun little class project to test your skills at the end. But it's gonna be a lot of fun of curated the class such that we'll be learning the techniques from the masters of all. We've also tailored it for the modern day lifestyle. So it's practical and by the end of this class, you'll make massive improvements in your handwriting. You learn an entire new scripts and would have picked up a lifelong skill. You can use anywhere and have loads of fun along the way. So let's get started. 2. Why Learn Handwriting?: Welcome along for the ride. I'm really excited that you're on board. It's gonna be a lot of fun. It's a skill that's going to keep giving back the longer you stick with it. So in this day and age where it takes almost no time to bring up an email. And was it halfway around the world? Some might ask why learn handwriting at all? So despite all of the digitization, handwriting still has its advantages. It's a proven fact that the very act of writing something down due to the psychomotor action, you're far more likely to remember it versus just typing. But I'm probably the best reason of the mall is just fun. It's incredibly therapeutic and it has the potential to support other aspects of your life. You can write it down topics you're learning, random ideas, journalling, which is one of my favorites, or even writing out your favorite book quotes, which I do quite often too. The thing is, and what I find so great about it is you're learning a lifelong skill that will just keep getting better and better with time and more enjoyable. And there are very practical reasons to the vast, vast majority of people don't hold the pen the right way or their posture isn't quite correct, which could lead to sores, pains, and aches. We'll be going through all of that too. So you can write more consistently, more comfortably, faster for longer periods of time without any aches and pains. Sometimes with a program like this, you get people that are worried that it will make their handwriting look exactly the same, unlike any personality. Well, I can tell you it couldn't be further from the truth. My analogy for this would be kind of like trying to make croissants by trial and error, which you would never do. But people do this all the time for handwriting versus going to pastry school with the croissant example, you would first need to learn the basic techniques, the principles of what makes good pastry in terms of balancing things together. And once you know all of that, you can then fine tune it to the taste of the person eating it. So e.g. you might prefer a pistachio filling over dark chocolate. Well, maybe even an almond creme filling. You can make all sorts of new inventions, but you will need to know the basics of what makes a good croissant before modifying it, personalizing it to your own taste. And so it's exactly the same with handwriting. We're going to learn about what makes handwriting beautiful, were going on about x heights, ascenders or descenders, slant, spacing the whole lot. Once you have a grasp and mastery on those principles, you can really truly make it your own. Alright, let's get into the technical stuff. 3. Class Project: So this class projects done going to be sharing with you now is a personal habits of mind is something that I do, at least on a weekly basis. So it's very close to my heart and it's an exercise that I love doing. So it's a fairly simple one. What we're gonna do is just find our favorite quote and then just write it out. Personally, what I like to do is find a highlights, extract, quotes from books that I've read previously, and then just write those out. So it kinda kills two birds with 1 st. The practice my handwriting, but also go through the things that I've read in the past to prevent myself from b, forgetting them and to keep it fresh in my mind. It could even be something inspirational, but it doesn't have to be. It could be a quote from a movie or a fiction book, just anything that you would enjoy writing. Now what I want you to do is write it out with your current handwriting on the top half of an A4 page and leave some room at the end and to date it. And at the end of the class, I'm going to write out the exact same passage with everything you've learned. And what you find with handwriting is, it's a slope iterative process. You never stop improving, but I'm still learning myself all the time and doing bits of correction all the time. But when you add those daily bits of improvement, it will add up to a lot. So they might come times when you're frustrated, things are slowing down. But with this, during the class and the weeks and months after, your handwriting is going to evolve. So, so much. But you won't necessarily see on a day-to-day basis, this would be a core record of your progress and how it's transformed. So no time for relaxing. We're going to start straightaway. It's improving. Your handwriting doesn't have to be complicated at all. It is, is a series of basic techniques which we've put together in a digestible way. And you practice a little bit every day and you literally see the progress. If you stick with it, I guarantee you will see leaps of improvement in your handwriting that you'll be able to keep forever for future. 4. Penhold, Posture, Paper Slant: Okay, so what we're gonna do here is to set the foundations. We're going to look at a few basic things. So how to hold the pen, the correct body posture, how to use the correct muscles to produce the correct movements and then the correct papers land. So once we get all of these things right, everything else becomes a lot easier posture wise. You want to sit with your back straight at all times and rotate at the hips so we want to get closer to the table. Well, you don't want to do is to round your back slump over like this. You don't wanna do that because it produces pain over the long term. So your spine should be completely straight and it should be all come at your hips, leave a little bit of a gap to the table. There should be a small angle towards the table. Now in terms of your arms, what do you do with your arms wanna do is you want to rest them on the table. And the point of which you do that is the part above the elbow. So just this fleshy parts above the elbow here. You want to rest on the edge of the table, both your arms on the edge of the table. We will look at movement a bit more in a later section. But what happens is this part stays planted on the table and it doesn't move relative to the table at all. What you wanna do is just rotate around this pivot point. This is actually where the majority of the support comes from. That rotation provides our range of movement for when we're writing. Remember you don't want to slump over your table. You want to leave a little bit of a gap to the table from where I've just below your chest and have a small angle and just less than 90 degrees towards the table. And then your arms are resting on the table and that should be your starting point is, and that's pretty much it. You've learned the correct posture and now you're ready to start writing. The first thing we're gonna do is figure out how to hold our pen, and it's fairly simple. So what we wanna do is you have your middle finger and your thumb fairly close together just like this. Then you place the pen on top of your middle finger where it's just resting like this. Close the other end with your thumb and all you do is rest your index finger on top like this. And that's pretty much it. It's what they call the tripod grip. And it's what all of the classical handwriting manuals and things teach. The key thing here really is to understand here, if you hold it like this, the main thing is not to grip to tie. I'm putting basically no pressure on these. If you're gripping is so tight that your nails are going whites, that you're gripping it far too tightly. Just hold it as large as you can, just enough to support the pen. The pen is not a heavy thing, so it's not really going to go anywhere. I'm very relaxed as you can see, I've got hardly any pressure, hardly any pressure on here, but the pen's not going anywhere. So this is how you would hold it. And the good thing about pens like these ones, as you can see, they've got ridges in here which are already designed for this kind of pen hold. Again. So you place your thumb on your middle finger like this. Grip the other side with your thumb and you just rest your index finger on top and that's it. So that would, that would give you for stability of your pen and you can write without without, without going anywhere. There we go. I fully understand the temptation at first to grip depend really tightly because that's the thing that gives you more support and control to make the letter forms. So if I clip it usually begin as group it really tightly so then they can make really accurate shapes. But it's not something I recommend because it gives you pain over the long term. And as we'll see later in the movement section, actually creating accurate like a four letter forms is actually the last thing you should focus on. It's doing the movement and the speed. The letter forms will come naturally if everything else falls into place. So just keep it light. No need to know, need to grip it to super tightly. So if you're sat at a correct distance from the table with a little gap just below your chest. And then you've got the areas just above your elbow on the forearm planted at the edge of the table. What would then happen is when you put your arms together, this angle here should correspond to about 90 degrees. So that tells you you're not too close to the table or you're too far from the tables over too far from the table is gonna look like this. Or if you're too close, your arm's going to come in. You don't want to be you don't want to be writing here at 90 degrees, then a 90 degrees. And then you have the rotation from your arm. This is kind of what we call our writing zone. This, this kind of range of movement here, which is the correct distance, is too close or too far away. That's not going to give you the correct level of support, leverage, and control you want. So just keep that in mind about 90 degrees and then you're set to go right now. So we want to talk about paper position. At the moment, I'm sad, head onto the table parallel and the paper is also straight and parallel to the table, which is what most people have. And there's nothing particularly wrong with it, but we need to talk about this cursive style in general. Now, in traditional Spencerian script is written at an angle of 52 degrees of slant. Now you might be wondering that's awfully specific. How am I going to write that 52 degrees? That sounds impossible. Well, don't worry, guys, you don't need to get your protractors out. There is a way to do this to determine what angle you're writing at. All you need to do is rotate your page. Because remember, everything else is pretty much fixed. We've got our arms fixed to the table. We've got a set distance from the table. We've got our backstreet, we've got a little slot, everything else is fixed. So the only thing that actually moves is the angle of the paper, and that's what determines our slant. So what we need to do is rotate the paper and it depending on what angle we rotate the paper, That's how how slant or strike our writing is. How do we, how do we rotate it? Well, it's actually fairly simple. What we do is we rotate the paper. I just like to call the corners of the paper, form a straight line going directly towards our body. And that's the, that's the angle of the paper where writing at. Now a lot of you may be thinking, why do we write a slant? What's the point of it? Why are we doing this at all? Is it just so that it looks pretty actually not at all, without getting too bogged down into the history in days gone past, cursive would actually invented as a rapid form of handwriting for business purposes. As opposed to like more ornate styles like copper plate where you had big line variations. The more artsy type of calligraphy instead of all we're doing now, which is handwriting. So the reason we have that salon is that naturally handwriting goes from left to right in a flowing motion. I'm whichever that flowing motion and helps you create a rhythm. And by following that rhythm, you can form every single letter from a very similar kind of motion up, up to the descenders, back down to the base line, slanting going forwards. And it should be very effortless. We look at the letters, they all have the same slant and then they support that left to right motion in a very smooth way, which is why it's called handwriting and not drawing, you're not drawing the letters. It's a very smooth motion and it's effortless. So now that you've got the page rotated, there is actually another way to check that everything's in the right place. The paper slant in the right place. You're on the correct writing zone, your elbows in the right place. What I want you to do is take your pen, will remember when we said rotate around the elbow. It is how you tell you're in currently in the writing zone and everything's in the right place for you to write. So rotate it to remember, Don't move your arm relative to the table. It should be fixed just above the elbow. All you're doing is rotating. Once you rotate it to the furthest extreme here, as you can see here, I can draw a cross and then rotate it to the other end of the extreme on the same line, can I reach the other end of the page on the same line? And the answer is yes, I can. So that means now where we've got the full range of motion on this page where they'll correct writing angle. We don't have to do any weird thing that we don't have to do any kind of weird things to reach where we want to reach everything's within our natural range of writing motion. And that's where we know where the correct position and the paper is at the correct slant and we're ready to write. Now remember, while this is early on in your journey, don't take any of these lessons for granted. Well, you must always do with handwriting or pretty much any skill in general is to constantly look at how you can improve. Constantly trying to catch yourself making any mistakes. If you, over a long term, you're back, starts rounding or something like this, always try to catch yourself and correct yourself. If you're slouching or your arms are coming too close to everything else stems from having a good posture. It might not feel natural at first, especially if you've picked up some bad habits, but definitely stick with it. And another thing, Don't worry or feel disheartened at all. If your handwriting appears to get worse initially, it's completely normal. After all, you're picking up a lot of new skills. You probably holding the pen in different way. The papers that are funny angle, you're using different movements. It's all very new, so it's completely normal for your handwriting to take a backward step. Initially, plasma running coach used to say, if you want to improve your posture, you have to get worse, to get better, but don't worry, it will soon feel very natural. Learning the correct posture and using the right muscles can mean you can run for long periods without aches, pains and things like this. And it really is the basis to take your handwriting to the next level with practice. 5. Talking about Movement: Right now, so we're setting the right position. So let's talk about the different types of movements when it comes to handwriting. So broadly speaking, there are four types of movements available. So the first one is called a finger movement. So this is basically what everyone does by default. You basically don't use any other part of your arm. You hold it in the normal hand grip. The only movement you do is through your fingers. There's no wrist action here, No Elbow pivoting, none of that stuff. It all in your fingers. And the reason why this is the standard way that most people use is because it gives you the most control. So this is how it would look like. So if you notice what I did there, I had to take my hands off the page multiple times. Why is that? Well, because our fingers are only really meant to move in one direction. They meant they meant to kind of bend inwards, but there's no side-to-side movement. So if you write a little bit bigger like this, even like a longer word, you, you're not gonna be able to write it without taking your hand off the page. And it's absolutely fine for people that are learning. But the issue with finger writing exclusively is if you write with long periods, you're really going to start feeling cramps in your fingers. After all, these are very, very small muscles. So you don't want to just rely on gripping your hand with your fingers and just planting your hand down just just using your fingers. It's not very good practice for longer sessions as a very limited range of motion. And if any of you have issues with e.g. your handwriting looking really, really scrunched up. This is probably the reason why Why? Because it's really limits the range of your motion. And if you don't take your hand off the page where you're basically forced to scrunch up that letter. So e.g. this, this movement word heads quite a long word. So it feels like this size. And then I wasn't to take my hand off the page and rely on finger writing, it would basically start getting very scrunched up, which is the source of the issue. So if you want to fix that, It's best not to rely solely on finger movement. I mean, there are some times when it is actually useful is e.g. if you're writing like very, very small scale, it does give you the most control. So I'm not saying it's wrong or there's no advantages to it. Just that you should be used in very specific situations sparingly. But so next up, we're gonna go on the other end of the extreme, we have what's called whole arm movement. Whereas in the finger movement, everything was stationary and it was planted. So we put a whole arm on the table. We rest the side of our palm on the table, and it was only the fingers moving. We add this kind of motion with whole arm movement. It's the actual opposite. With our righting arm, we take the entire arm off the table. We don't even we don't even plant the edge above our elbow on the edge of the table. Everything is off the table. So this the advantage of this is it gives you the widest range of motion. So the difference would be e.g. if I was to write using a whole arm movement, it would look like this. So as you can see here, I wrote the entire length without any issue too. I didn't have to take my hand off the page. Nothing because it just gives you so much motion. Whereas in a finger movement, e.g. in my entire range of motion is the maximum rate. My range of motion, if I was to show it, will be like this. That's probably it. That's another really, really stretching and you know, that's That's basically what I've got. But with whole arm movement, there's basically no restriction. I can go anywhere I want to. So that's the advantage of it. But what other disadvantage? Well, the problem with this one is because you have nothing supporting your arm whatsoever. The only support is your little finger and your ring finger. So there's not much support at all. And it gives you the least amount of control. But the whole idea of it is, instead of using your fingers, all of that motion actually comes from your shoulders. Actually, there's no movement from your fingers whatsoever. Your fingers would put remain completely still and it all comes from your shoulders. So actually in days gone past, if you look at the really old handwriting manuals where Having good handwriting and writing, being able to write quickly was a key part of being employed. This was actually the standard way that was taught. It was all whole of handwriting because it gives you the least amount of strain on your arm. You can write faster for longer periods. But then the downside of this is to get any sort of accuracy. You really have to put in hours and hours of drills constantly. You really needed to build up a certain speed and rhythm. Should be able to write consistently with this way, which I don't think it's very practical and nowadays it's not a great fun to drill for hours and hours on end. And we don't have to write as fast as humanly possible, nor do we really want to. So this brings us actually onto what's called muscular movements. Since the halfway houses between these two extremes. So when the whole arm movement, we had our entire arm off the table. What we do is we plant the part of our arm just above the shoulder here on the edge of the table. So there's actually some support here. And then the other contact point is again, our little finger and our ring, ring finger. With this one, we still have actually a very big range of motion. So what we said before about the center of the page, if we rotate it about the contact point where we touch with the table. So with this rotation, this is now our range of motion. So it's not as big as before because we're restricted on how much forwards and backwards we are. But it's still, as you can see, it's still a lot more than the finger movement. So e.g. I. Can go from here all the way to here, which is enough for a line. If we wanted to go down the line, we would shift the page. Whereas in the whole arm movement you wouldn't need to shift the page at all because you have access to the entire page. The thing in common that muscular movement has with whole arm movement is again, we have an almost zero finger movement. It's all in, but this time instead of all it coming from the shoulder, it comes from the elbow. So we have that little bit of extra control. So this is e.g. this is what it would look like if I was to write with it. So it will be. So as you can see here, we can write these big words, no problem at all in one stroke. Sometimes as you saw that we do want to kinda adjusted page between words if you want. So it's not necessarily because you can still reach the full range of motion if we're talking about the old handwriting manuals, actually this type of movement, muscular movement, was actually very, very popular too, because it does jump very well. You're also, you're also using very big muscles in your arm, not relying on those fingers. And you're able to write comfortably for a very long time. And to be honest, you don't hold our movement is not really necessary unless you're doing calligraphy or some very ornate stuff. You don't need to access the whole page. Being able to go from one end of the line to the other is more than enough for regular handwriting. And now another thing we want to focus on actually with muscular movement. The difference between muscular movement and finger movement. With the finger movement, we need to plant this side of our palm onto the table like this to provide that support for our fingers because all of our movement is on. Our thing is we don't need any wrist or shoulder movement, so we can do that. But with muscular movement, you don't actually want to plant the side of your hand down to get to enable it to have that range of motion. So what we do is instead of having your hand side on like this, we want a 45-degree angles, so you twist it a little bit and then the only contact points are these two fingers. So it'd be like this. So you just need to remember, not, not, not to rest the side of your hand down to give it that range of motion. That's the only other consideration. The other point of that is when you rotate your hand around and I should discourage his finger movement. Whereas you can do a lot of thinking movement like this. When it's rotated like this, you can't do as much with your fingers. So now it's encouraging you to use that elbow, which is what we're going for now personally, I use this one most of the time when I'm journaling myself, writing random bits down as you can get a really good rhythm. It feels weird at first, but once you get used to it, it'll be really nice. What are the downsides of this one? Well, most people aren't used to not using their fingers at all. So it does take a decent amount of drills and practice to get the same amount of control. In my opinion, if you're open to devoting a bit of time to it every day, I think it's absolutely worth it and you should absolutely go for finger movement. However, in terms of this course, as it is a beginner's course, what I would do to get started is make a slight modification onto this and make something called combination movement. With combination movement, it's very, very similar to muscular movement, where you still plan the side of your arm on the table. You're using that elbow action. But for smaller and more intricate letters, we are allowed to use a finger movements. So hence the name combination movement. It's a combination of muscular movement. I'm thinking movement. So when it comes to between the letters, we're still going to use that rotation to write the whole word out and the big letters. But on the small letters, we are allowed to use something and movement. So you're not going from, you know, for, for most people you're not going from a pure finger movement to zero finger movement because that might be a bit too much of a change. We're going to ease our way in and it's probably the most practical way. So I mean, this is what it would look like. So as you can see here, it's very similar to the muscular movement, but now I'm using a little bit more of my fingers for those small letters. So have a play with them. See which one suits you best. The two you should try is muscular movement and combination movements. See which one feels best with you. Definitely, I definitely wouldn't go for pure finger movement. That just doesn't work. Hold on movement. It's I wouldn't really say it's worth it unless you're willing to put a lot of time on to it. So yeah, give these to try and see how that goes, right, okay, so that's the theory on all of the movements. So what we're gonna do now is actually put some drills in to put this all into practice. 6. Drills: So now we're moving onto our drills. These are actually the very core, basic, most basic drills. But having said that, even though they are basic, in my opinion, they're probably the most important of all the drills that we have there definitely what I still do the most to this day, they're really, really important. And I think if you really master these, it says you offer such a good foundation for good handwriting later on. So this is the very first one is what we call the push-pull drill. It's actually very basic. We start with a stroke like this, and then we just create these lines that look similar to what's on here. So this is why we do it. We do them ten at a time, 1 234-567-8910 and apply this. And I noticed the things we really want to focus on here is not exactly drawing the lines exactly as they are here. What we want to focus on are two main things. Number one is speed. We want about 200 strokes per minute. It does speak. I was going out really want to focus on the speed. Well, you really don't want to do is to draw the shapes. And this doesn't apply just to, this applies to all of handwriting is probably one of the worst things you could do. And what do I mean by drawing it versus writing it? So e.g. if you were to really slow it down and not use your arms at all, just use your fingers to do to do something like this. That would be what we would call a drawing. You don't actually want to do that. So a couple of things you really want to focus on. The first one is you really want to keep the strokes are very, very light. So I like to have a cushion sheet under all my pieces of paper when I'm writing. And when you do these strokes, the last thing you wanna do is put so much pressure that I create a groove on the page below. If you notice for me, it's completely no markings here. No nothing because I'm keeping my pressure very, very light. When you're doing handwriting, you shouldn't feel the need to put any pressure down at all. And that's why actually, I recommend if you had a choice between using a borrow or a pencil for this exercise, I'd actually, most of your handwriting exercise, I would actually recommend a pencil because it's just easier to write with very little pressure. And of course, if you have a fountain pen, that will be perfect. The other thing is, when I was completely brand new to handwriting and I saw these drills, they look kinda trivial to me. I didn't really see what the point was. They look, they're very easy to do and I don't really see how it can benefit me. Well, actually there's a couple of reasons why we do this and why it's so fundamental. And now why i now still do it every single day. It's because as we mentioned early on, with this type of particular cursive script, there's a 52 degrees slant line. And we do this by rotating our page to what it is now. So we would never have to vary our angle of our writing with random lines like this. It's always, always comes directly straight back to our body. This is basically what its training, all of the basis of our strokes from our letters would come from this kind of backwards motion back towards the baseline. And that's really one of the big things is muscle memory. We're training our muscle memory to do the same thing consistently every single time. And of course the movement is a big, big thing. This is actually one of the key things we're actually training here is to correct movement. So as we said before, we like to put the area just above our elbow along the edge of its plants, along the edge of the table. And then when we do this stroke, actually, we don't use our thing at all. When we actually go on to do the handwriting section, we're combination movement. You are allowed to use your fingers. But with this exercise, what it's actually training is that kind of arm movement, that elbow movement. You're not using your fingers whatsoever. Because by default, most people actually use their fingers to write. This is actually training to incorporate the elbow u2. So if you notice how I do it with this exercise, make sure you don't lose your fingers whatsoever. It's all coming from your elbow that your arm moving back and forth against the table with your part above your elbow just planted along. So let's do a couple more. So it'd be 1 234-567-8910. And you can do a couple more of you like so you can, But there has to be very fast like this, so you don't engage your fingers whatsoever. And if you really get used to this motion is to make your handwriting like so so much more consistent. And it's a really great, great warm-up to do. I do it a lot of the time. If you can, early on, I would recommend you doing these exercises every single time before a long writing session, just so that it primes your handwriting. So, so much better. Just to do a couple more. So again, more of that motion forwards and backwards to and from your body. Keeping a very, very light, keeping a consistent, we want to keep it fast and no finger movement at all. If you find yourself putting too much pressure, just take it off a little bit. Most of it actually does come from your grip. So if you find you find you're creating a big massive grooves in the paper below. Just check your grip, just see if you just didn't just always manually check in with yourself. Are you gripping the pen far too tightly? Just loosen. Everything needs to be loose. Give yourself a little stretch. If you need to be, everything should be smooth and flowy and flexible so there's no stiffness, so you don't create these kind of jagged lines even and it translates a lot in the quality of your strokes. There's no wobbling nurse and that none of that, it's all straight and smooth. And try and keep your lines are as close to possible as you can. What you should notice is that if you're really loose, you should feel some sort of rhythm like a pendulum almost from your elbow. So that's really it for the push pull exercise. Keeping your strokes light, not using your finger movement at all. Keeping things relaxed forwards and backwards to the body. That is pretty much it. And now we'll move on to the ovals. And again, it's pretty much the same thing in terms of our philosophies. We want to keep it light. We want to not engage our fingers whatsoever. Our fingers are remaining completely static. Nother kind of this movement. We don't do any of that stuff. Part above our elbow just on the edge of the table. And the only the only contact we want with the paper is our pinky finger and our ring finger. We don't want to rest the whole side of our hand on the paper. So that, so that gives us a really good range of motion on the paper. Let's say this is how we would do it. So we'd follow the arrows. So notice here again, it's about the speed. We want to keep it roughly about the speed that I'm doing. Don't worry too much about the shape. Well, I don't want you to do is to slow it right down and then try and draw the perfect oval. Because the first thing is it's going to result in a poorer quality of your life. You're going to have wobbly lines and it's really not what we want to do. We don't care about doing perfect ovals. We're focusing on our movement. We're building up that muscle memory. So yeah, I'm keeping keeping up the speed using the correct movement, keeping things light. So again, we do ten. There we go. So another ten. So you want to keep it kind of slanted. It's very, very faint on here, but I'm on your worksheets. Hopefully I would've updated them, but I'm there'll be some slight lines. You want to do your ovals in the same direction as the slant lines. Now, the reason why we do ovals, as well as the push polls, where if you do these two movements, these two drills, they actually make up a lot of the shapes you will be drawing with the push polls. It'll be a lot of the straight lines. They always come back to the base I, almost every letter has a feature where it comes back to the slant line and then the oval is two. In cursive script is quite flowy and a lot of the shapes are actually based on a part of an oval. So with these two strokes, it will directly translate itself very well to when you start learning the letters. So carrying on. I'm trying to keep my fingers as as static as possible, just using my elbow area to do these lines. Not worrying about the shape of any one individual oval as long as most of them are kind of within that range. That's kinda what we're looking for, building up that kind of muscle memory. You can do variations in these, you know, you don't have to do just 1010 in it. Tell him one go. You can do kind of looping over. So this one is going in a different direction. So we'll do first ten in the other direction. And then we can do like looping over it was, so it'll be something like this. You should do it until you feel quite loose. There shouldn't be any stiff. It should come quite naturally to you. And once you have that kind of natural movement, that should translate directly into learning the letters. So when it comes to learning handwriting, most people actually focus on the shapes when in fact, actually all of the things you need to focus on is actually the least important, the very most important number one thing is to get the correct movement. And once you do get a correct movement, it's far, far easier to do the right shapes than the other way round. So that's pretty much it in a nutshell. This is the push-pull drill and the oval Joe's. It's really, really important and if you master this, you'll be in a very good place. So yeah, give it a go. And before we move on to the next section. 7. Small Letters - Part 1: Right, so going through our model was more letters. Now, we've so far gone through our body position, our correct movement. We've done some drills. Now it's onto how to actually write the letters, deforms what they look like. We're going through each individual letter, some of the small nuances, that sort of thing with you. But before we start, we need to understand a few of the terminology of how these letters are. And as you can see, it's not in alphabetical order. I've ordered all of the letters in specific different defined groups, which will make it a bit more sense as we go along. So firstly, with some terminologies. So what we have here, this one here is called our baseline. Every letter actually must come back to the baseline. So it's the most, one of the most important lines we have an above and below it we have our different divisions. So we've got 33 in total above from the baseline and two below the baseline. So as we go along, we'll find out that we're in handwriting. Proportion is actually hugely, hugely important. As long as you maintain proportion along different sizes, they're always loved correction, no matter how small or how big your rights you don't want to do is to start changing sizes as you write in different sized levels. It's having the baseline is very, very important. This here is actually known as the x-height. This x-height is what determines the size of all of your handwriting. Everything else is actually based off the base height in terms of how many times bigger or smaller it is done base height. So when we have our descenders, like when we do our g's and Fs and things like this, how far they go below the baseline as actually depends on the base height. So this would be what we call the descender here. And then anything above the x-height will be called our ascender. So that's the basic core terminology. Let's go through and start going through these letters. So obviously we have the first letter a. So we start at the very top of our x-height. You'll come around in like an oval shape, up, down back to their baseline and a tail. And it tapers in and up. So a couple of things to note here. We want to use the entire height of our x-height. So we start at the very top of our x-height and then down and then touch the baseline up, down and then flick. So what we don't want to do is to miss, miss the top of the x-height like this. That's not correct because there's a little bit of a gap here or what we don't want to do is do this not quite touch. It has to start at the top of the x-height and then it always comes down to the baseline. Always. And another thing is when it comes to handwriting, most people going to just focus on the shape, which is correct. But there's also another thing that you must do and that's to focus on a lot of the negative spaces. So if I just do another a here, kinda like this. So what we need to do is actually focus on some of that negative space. So what, what do I mean by that? So if I just get another color pen to show you what I mean. So that negative space would be these regions here. So that's actually very indicative in terms of telling you how your letters look. They're always should be a gap here. So when we start at a, we come almost like it comes almost directly out this way and then it curves downward. So out, down. Remember that negative space, a gap here, and in the flake. And another thing of what we wanna do is we want to make sure our letters follow the correct slant line. So with that, with all of our letters to 52 degrees slant line we were talking about. So when we draw a straight line through our letters, that's the slant of our letters. That needs to be along the 52 degrees slant line, which that's indicated on your sheets. So moving on, we've got the C we can It's very similar to the a and that's fact that it has to start at, touch the top of the x-height and then touch the baseline. That's all it is. So you've gotta do a curve. Touching the top, touching the bottom, making sure the slant is correct. So just keep referring back to the model letter. We want a nice curve to it. That's how it would look like. More of the same from the E This time we're starting at the very base of the slant line and then doing a loop around. Starting at the bottom of the baseline, touch the top, top of the baseline, back down and up. So everything is always looping. There's no straight lines with any of these. They always looping. So you want to create that smooth motion, which is where our drills came in from earlier. So at the bottom of the baseline, touched the top as it's curving down. What you don't want to do is like any straight lines. So you don't want to do kinda like this. And then like a weird thing, it should always be curving around. This is about building that muscle memory. It's far more important to understand how it feels to write the letter than drawing out the letters. So you need to maintain. You don't wanna go superfast, but you want to maintain a decent pace. By this, we've got our O's, which as you can see, is not actually a cycle, isn't an oval-shaped. And actually almost all of the letters are based off parts of an oval in this kind of cursive script. So let's have a look at how we would start go about doing that. It started here and touch the top, go around and then loop. So start in the middle, loop around and then across. Start in the middle, loop around in an oval and then they cross. Now, an important thing to note is if you're going quick, they sometimes could be a tendency to do like an extra loop at the top, like something like this, right? We don't typically want an extra loop at the top. We want our eyes to be uninterrupted. So not like this. Like this instead. Now we're moving on to our eyes. Now with letters like this, we start seeing why there was benefit in doing those push-pull drills. So if I write now, we start off at the baseline, touch the top of the baseline, and then back down towards our body. Unlike this, that's this stroke here is why we did the push-pull Jos, because it's very instinctive move and we pull it back directly to our body. This is how we get that consistent salons without those pull, push, pull drills. And sometimes people rush, all sorts of weird things can start happening. So sometimes you get stuff like this. This, this is just, it starts becoming very inconsistent, which is one of the things we always want to avoid if you have inconsistent handwriting, that's what makes it illegible. So by doing those, plus Pooja was having the letter come back down straight to our body. It creates that consistency across all of our letters. And that's how it works. So we would do. And then this will come back down along the slant line and then up, touch the base, and then up and then the dots. So again, we do up, touch the top of the x-height down along slot nine and then the flick. And also because it's coming straight back to our body, it's also the most ergonomic way to write. So it helps you build up that rhythm as we go along, as we start joining the letters together and building up a little bit more speed. 8. Small Letters - Part 2: Right, Okay, So moving on to our next set of letters. These are all small letters. So we're going to go to our M is a bit more strokes with this one. So we start off on the baseline. Curve, Up, down, up, down. So remember what we said about looking at the negative spaces with this one, with the M, arguably it's even more important than some of the other letters we've seen. These regions happen. Keeping these, these, these regions consistent is really, really important. So looking at these, keeping these consistent, also even, even here, making sure that there's a gap here, helps make your letters look a lot more consistent. And also with each one of these down-strokes, remember to pull directly to our words, our body to keep that consistent slant. So again, what we don't want to do is scrunch things up too close together without that slant line. So an example would be something like this. That's not what we want. So notice here all the negative spaces are gone. That would be incorrect. We want those negative spaces between these two arches, but also from the top as well. So that's why looking at those negative spaces is actually really important. Now of course, another thing to note from these exercises, you would almost never write this big. By writing this big, it helps you train that muscle movement. It's easier to use your forearm movements by writing a little bit bigger. Also, your mistakes show up easier and as long as you maintain that proportion when you scale it down, should be a lot easier. N is pretty much the same philosophy as the M. You're looking at. All the same things. You're starting at the baseline, you're touching at the top of the x-height. You're looking at the same areas for negative space to make sure it is consistent pulled towards your body on the downstrokes. I'm making sure you're putting on the correct curves when it hits the top of the x-height. So no abrupt sharp edges. Always to maintain a good speed without drawing the letters. And it's very, very important that you keep those back strokes consistent. The ones that you're putting direct job towards your body. Otherwise, you're going to start getting weird things happening like e.g. on the end sometimes the strokes, can you see that that's not consistent angle and then starts looking very weird. So really pay attention to that. Really pay attention to pulling the downstroke directly towards your body, touching a baseline before moving on. And another thing sometimes I'll see people do is not quite touching the base IN and going to the next letter that starts messing things up to the u is pretty much an inverted n. So looking at all of the same things in reverse, baseline, up, down, up, down curve, maintaining all of the negative spaces, the curves keeping consistent, downstrokes towards our body. Keeping that rhythm, keeping it light, also. Not applying any pressure on the page. Just letting the pen your arms do the work. We've got our v, which has a sharper taper than the EU, but it's still not a triangle. It's still rounded off at the very bottom. Other than that, it's very similar. So maintaining that slant and having to very small curves at the top and the bottom. That's how it would look. Now the W is a funny one. There's two variations on this. So notice in the model letter here, what I've done is I've, these negative spaces are at two different widths. This one here is slightly thicker and this one here is slightly thinner. Why have we done this? Why have we done this? Because in some specific words, it can be easy to confuse a U and an eye for a w. So if you and I, and if it's the same width, That's a W, it can look a little bit similar. Somewhat some people decide to do is have the second arch, a smaller. Width and the first one. So it's easier to distinguish, but it's not a must. If you want them to be the same width, It's absolutely post, it's absolutely fine. So either like either like this or you can have big a one and a small one. It's completely up to you, but all of the other principles still apply. So I have to touch the baseline, top of the x-height, slant towards your body. And everything still applies and a good amount. Rhythm like this. Okay, moving on to our next set of letters. We've got our x, which looks a little bit weird. But again, all the exact same principles apply in terms of baseline thought down. And then just a straight line across baseline curve around, down, up and across. So now we're starting to move on to some bigger letters. And it's here, it's important to remind that the proportion is really, really important. So we've got these lines here. And each one of these lines is calibrated to one x-height in distance. So we've got the x-height here. There's one x-height to x heights. And then we've got three. So the ascender of this d. So we have the main portion of the D here, which is one x height and length. And then this tail here goes up to one more x-height in length. And then this part here actually looks a little bit similar to the a and the fact that it comes out almost horizontally and then it curves around. So this is how it would look. So it down, curve horizontally and then we go up against your slant down like this. So all the same principles apply. Sauce of the x-height. We have to touch the base line up and then back down. Don't forget to touch the baseline on the way down. This detail of the D here is going up along the slant line all the time. No forgetting that negative space here. And that's your D. Now we've got our hours. It's one of the very few letters that's actually goes a little bit above the x-height with the main portion. As you can see, our x-height is here. We've got this little bit that goes slightly above it. So that's something you want to keep in mind. Start off with a bottom and a down. Start off at the bottom. Down the bottom, drawer it back towards your body. Sort of at the bottom over the x-height down. Anabolic. Paying attention to the slant line and going back to the baseline with the S is actually a very, very similar situation. It goes slightly above the x-height. Up curves around touch and an out. Because up curves around touch and then out. It really is with all of these, it really is a big thing just to remember the shape of these letters. Just study all of the forms, all of the curves in a lot of detail, the proportions. And it should come a lot easier to just what you want, you want to do is make corrections as you go along. Just keeping it as close to the model letters as you can. With a T, it's another letter that's two x heights in height. This is two x. So baseline up all the way and then back down along the slant line and a flick along the slant line and the flake along the slant line. And I flick back up, along, down the lungs like mine. And I flick, flick. 9. Small Letters - Part 3: So now we're moving on to our next set of letters. Now with these ones, these are the biggest lessons we've come across so far with the ascenders. It actually goes three times the height from the baseline, three x heights. And then the descenders for the F is actually to x heights. We start off at the baseline, do an oval and up we touch, we start curving around and touch the top, back down along the bay, along the slant line, curve back to the baseline and an arrow like this. Now admittedly, personally, I do actually struggle with these letters the most. One of the key thing I struggle with, It's maintaining that kind of sharp looking curve at the top and the bottom. The temptation is if you rush too much, it will round too much. So just a couple more. We're doing we do an oval all the way around. And then when we come back down this line here should be straight, curved back to the baseline and then out and that's your f. Not sure if now going on to the G, This Paul here is actually identical to what we did before in terms of our a's and d's. It's also very similar at the top of the x-height. Come down around, touch the top. And then we go down. And as we come from, remember to keep that kind of sharp curve around and then it crosses at the baseline. That's what g looks like. One of the temptations. If you go to quick what I, what I used to do and I still struggle with a bit on the Gs is if you go too fast, it can you see that's rounded too much. We don't want that ran it too much. We want like a little bit of a sharp, sharper edges in this sort of at the top, round along the slant line. Like this. Not like a triangle sharp, but we want a tapered angle here and then a smooth sloping curve back. What we don't want is like a is something like this. None of that stuff. We want a smooth sloping kind of elegant oval where it crosses roughly at the baseline. That's what we're looking for. Remembering this x-height and remembering this negative space here. So a couple more. This does take a bit of getting used to especially that tail. What I find really helps is if you slowed towards the end of the tail, slow down before the switchback. Otherwise it's very easy to start rounding things off. So out, turn down, slow down, and then like this, out, down, slow down, get a nice pointy edge. And then a smooth, consistent, elegant curve. Backup. We've got our j, which starts off like an eye, and then it ends off like allergy we've just done. Like without hour, we start off at the baseline, touched off of the baseline. We're pulling back along the slant line. And then just like our g, we slowed down and then curve it around into an elegant curve, touching at the baseline. And that's pretty much our G baseline. Down, slow down, curve. And around. All about keeping that smooth, consistent stroke. So I mentioned a few times about not drawing your letters. And these letters is especially important because if you slow it down too much and you really, really try to draw it, you're lying, starts getting all wonky. So if you were like this and you are tracing the slant line down and then you did this. Can you see you start getting a little bit of wobbly nurse. The lines just don't look so elegant. So you really need to put at least a little bit of speed. And now I don't mean to rush your letters, but certain sections, you want some speed to increase that elegance of your lines are down here, but then decent speed, curve it around. So we've got our piece. So the main thing here is actually this part actually extends above the x-height. Again, it's another one of those weird ones. So we start off the baseline as we've done so many times. Go up above your x-height, down, and then curve around, crossing roughly at the baseline, touching the top round. So this tail here doesn't actually have to quite touch to x heights down. As long as at least over 1.5, we're good to go. So again, up above the x-height, down past one x-height, switch back, touch the top of the x-height, down, baseline and outs. Do one more and out. Okay? Q. Now this shape should start looking pretty recognizable to you. Now, this bit here is the same as our g, the a to D. This is our Q star over the baseline, but sound touch the baseline again, leaving a gap up with this. Instead of like the a, we're going all the way down, sharp curve, back up to the baseline and out. Alright, so let's do a couple more. Remembering pulling direct towards your body. Keeping the proportions the same. Touching all of the main areas in terms of the baseline, the top of the x-height. And there we have it. 10. Small Letters - Part 4: Okay, continuing on, moving on with our big letters. Why is that? H k? We've got our y's and this one is important to remember, to keep it moving all the way around is this area here. We don't want an up and straight down, we want that curve. So our curve around another curve. This one is a straight down, slow down, and then a curve around. So yeah, just maintaining those curves only only only here. We do a straight abrupt backstroke down. Okay, down around. Curves back up to the baseline. Down, go back up to the baseline. Backup to the baseline. And of course, this straight line here when we're doing our downstroke is along our slant line. Keeping that switch back here nice and pointy. Well, we don't want to do is rounding it too much like that. None of that stuff. It doesn't look anywhere near as elegant. It's not what we're going for, but sometimes does happen if people rush too much. So yeah, keep focusing on that. Now we've got our z. It's the least used the letter of the alphabet, so least practiced. All the more reason to learn this one properly. Start off with the baseline round. First it touches the baseline like this and this curve. Round. And backup round. I'm backup round, I'm backup. Touch the baseline around. Backup. Now we've got our B, h k. It's similar to our y's and then I accuse what we saw and then our g's, the philosophy in that, this top bit here. The key thing here is make sure it's not too rounded. And all of these facts strokes there directly straight. And here it's straight. You can see on the starting stroke, you can see it's one that continuous curve. So just imagine that as part of an oval. So if we're doing our BLS, if I just do it up here, that will be because you don't want so that would be an oval, but that'll be an oval. And then your B would be the first part of that oval here. First part of that oval here. We start off at the baseline. We do the first part of that oval, do a return that straight down and then rounds at one x-height and across. Nice continuous curve up, returns straight down one X height across round. So especially with letters like this and at this size, It's really now it's, the emphasis is really important to go for that little bit of extra speed as we spoke about. Otherwise, you're not, you're just not gonna be able to do this smooth curve at this size. And even though you're not going to write it this size a lot, if you maintain and master doing smooth strokes here, it will make your handwriting looks so much better when you scale down in size. H is actually very, very similar to the beat. Most of the strokes are similar. So all of the things we just did now, so it starts off at the baseline. The only main thing to note, and the biggest difference with the B is this second downstroke here, the last part of our age, remember this BIP should always be parallel to this bit. And again, along the slant line straight toward somebody. I need to keep drilling that in. What I do see sometimes is when people rush if I do one up here, if I actually don't know if I just come back down here. What sometimes sends type and if people when people rush, they come down and then starts going out of shape, see, can you see that the angle is not the same, so that would be the angle here. But then this is the angle here. That's not what you want. What you want is to maintain these two, these two The same angle. These should be parallel. So it should be kind of like this. Which this, this is what it would look like down. Like this, right? So don't rush. Always bring that back down towards your body and to touch the baseline. That's what we're aiming for. More of the same with our case. Big long tail up, down, touch the baseline. Another thing you want to focus on, it's not hyper, super set in stone, but where these two lines cross, it should be between one-and-a-half x height. So about here to one x-height Xhosa be within that region, is where these two lines cross. You don't want it to start crossing too high or too low down, otherwise it wouldn't start looking too good. So about one to one-and-a-half x height where these two lines cross like this. Right? So we've got our final letter with its very own sheet. We've got L. There's nothing particularly different about this one. It's very similar to the other tall letters we've done. Again, this part is an oval. Make sure we have a pointy return back down. And this is a straight line to touch the baseline along where our slant line is. And that's pretty much it. So that's pretty much it. These are all of the small letters. All it is a few fairly simple concepts, but it does take a little while to master. So I would recommend doing a little bit of practice every single day. It goes a really long way. So remember our few key principles. Remembering our baseline. I'm remembering all of the proportions. Remember all of the letters going along this slot line here, keeping it consistent. That's all it really is, really looking at your handwriting objectively, always going back and comparing it to the model letters, looking for any kind of small differences, and then just correcting it as you go along. And you'd be really surprised at how big of a difference all of these small little adjustments can accumulate to over time. So, um, yeah, give that a go. 11. Capital Letters - Part 1: Using capital letters. Now, with these letters, obviously by far you will not be using them anywhere near as much as your small letters. But I love these so much because they're far, far more expressive and in my opinion, a lot more fun to write. It offers so much more variation to between the letters. Whereas with the small letters, the most of it's built up of the same few basic shapes. In a lot of these you see commonality as well, but there's much more variation. And it also allows you to add a lot more personal touch to it in terms of how the letters themselves vary, but also putting your own personal spin and modifying things as you see fit, right? So let's get started going onto our first letter a, a lot of these we'll follow the same rules and principles in terms of touching the baseline slant or these things. So all of the things we've learned hasn't gone out the window. We're just adding more layers on top of that. So we start off at the bottom of the baseline. And then we do it like a constant radius up and then down and then around an a loop. So with this one, what you want to be conscious of with the slant line, it's kinda, it goes in the middle, middle of the letter. So if we do another one, so baseline up, down and around. So what you want to aim for is having the slant line going through the middle. So like this or whatever, you've decided to write out, aim for it. Being in the middle of the letter. Another one. So especially at this size, what you really want to be conscious of it doing that muscular movement. Obviously, I wouldn't be able to do finger writing at this level. So just remembering that what we learned before. Whereas with a lot of the small letters, you can technically get away with a lot of thing or writing just because it's so small and you want it a bit more accurate and all of these things. So I think naturally a lot of people gravitate towards finger writing, and that's absolutely fine for the small letters, but for the big letters, a lot of the time that they're bigger. So you do have to use a lot more of your the muscular movement that we learned before. So keeping our fingers lock straight, loop up, down around. And that's a with this one, I don't tend to join it with some of the other letters. You can join it. You don't have to join it if you don't want to. But with an a, I tend to leave it as a standalone. Now moving on to our b, with each of these letters, it's divided into three zones. So we've got the x-height here as two x heights, a3x heights, where we want to start with our stroke is in the middle row here. So it will go here all the way up to the top, straight line, down almost a straight line backup. And then at the very end we do a curve, curve and then a sharp change in direction. So at this point here, you can join it on to the next letter to continue the word or you can just leave it as is, literally just depends on how you feel. If you want to mix it up, That's absolutely fine. Most of the time I just do my capital letters separate, but you can join it. Or if I just want to mix it up completely fine. And again, talking about muscular movement, again, we're talking about that kind of push-pull. Germany, that push-pull drill in terms of pulling that line at towards your body. That's basically what you're doing here for this big long stroke here. We start off the stroke, we curve it up and then when it comes back down, we pull it directly towards our body. So the slant of this capital letter B is actually determined by this second line here. So here do a curve, post straight towards our body and then back up. So this is how this would work. And making sure we don't do our separation to early on. You want to keep it fairly, fairly late in the upstream. Want to keep it fairly close to this downward stroke. And then at the very end, curving back around. And you want to use all the page. So you want to touch all the way to the top and to the bottom. You don't want to start getting lazy and doing things like missing the tub or ending early. And you have this little gap here. That's not right. So just using the entire width and remembering the correct proportions, now see the C-shape, a very similar one. So we do a little loop here, which takes up the entire third row. And then we, and then we curve it back around. So what you'll notice actually as we go along doing these big letters, you'll notice that a lot of the letters actually have this little loop here. So why do we have That? Is it? It to look nice. Well, I mean, it does look fairly nice, but that's actually not the main purpose when this style of cursive handwriting was invented. It was of course, back when a time when handwriting had to be very functional. You need it for business purposes and all of these things and all of that has to come at a speed. And to gain that speed, what you would do, what they would do is do a wind-up. Obviously, you wouldn't be able to draw the letters. You'd write all of these at speed and then keep a certain rhythm. A certain kind of movement is back and forth, back and forth as well. I'll push, pull and our oval exercises come in as part of that emotion. This little loop here is actually part of that wind up. So this is, this is, this is the kind of movement you want to let that back-and-forth movement, it would be actually part of the windup like this. So that gives you an idea of the speed, the movement, the rhythm you should be writing out to form like really elegant strokes. So just in case you were wondering where these, all of these little loops come from. That's the thinking and the philosophy behind it. If you find yourself going very, very slowly, drawing it out, doing wonky lines, that's absolutely not what it should be. Just maintain your speed. So remember what you wanna do is maintain a decent amount of speed, keep up a good rhythm, and then the shapes will come. Don't obsess too much. If your letters look a little bit out of shape, just maintain the rhythm and the speed. And then the rest will come. So wind up and around, wind up and around. Now moving on to the D, I really like this one. It's a very flowy, kind of elegant shape. We start off at the very top of our scale. Down, do a little loop, and then up and loop around. So it's all very flowy when you read the literature of how the found they came up with a lot of these shapes by looking at landscapes, mountains, rivers. I really see it in letters like this. So keeping that smooth movement, muscular movement starts off at the top, loop around, loop around the top. Keeping everything as smooth as you can. And that's our dy. Now remember when we're talking about having that loop like we had in our C. Well, it's exactly the same thing with e. We've got that little loop from our wind-up, which sets up the movement for the rest of the letter. So let's, let's let's see how we would do it. A little wind-up. So doing a little wind-up. And that's how E, So just keeping that smooth movement, having that wind up. 12. Capital Letters - Part 2: Alright, moving on. Next set of letters right now, okay, moving on, we've got an excess of letters. We've got f, which is a little bit different to the other ones we've seen before in that it comes in several different parts, whereas all the other ones before just come from one stroke. Looping around. This one has three distinct parts. So what we would do is we'd start off at the very top, going down, up and around. Then we will come back and then do a loop around the top. And then finally, a little horizontal line across. As with all of the big letters, if you want to join it, you can do so. Normally how it works is it will be like this. You will start off at the top. Loop around this. We come all the way around and enjoying onto your next letter. And then you would finish off the entire word before you finish off and come back and do the top here. So you do the loop around and in the cross. Remember to keeping it smooth. So with this down stroke here, it's not a completely straight line. It kind of curves one way and then it curves the other way. But only very, very subtly. You don't want to overdo it. Loop. And then across. So just very, very subtle them with all of these things. Just remember if you're ever doing changes, don't make big dramatic changes, all in subtlety. So it curves one way and then the other. But of course, the average, if you were to draw a straight line through it, that would be pretty much our slant line. And then cross. And that's our f. Now moving on to our G, and I don't know about you, but before I personally started looking into handwriting doing cursive properly, my jeans were very, very different from this. It's almost unrecognizable from what I've done. So it's all capital letters. This is probably the, was probably the most foreign shaped to me. But again, it follows all of our principals that we've done. So it shouldn't be too difficult. So we do a straight. How this work is, we'll start off at the bottom here. It's basically a straight line up, curves around, and it goes up to the top of the second row and then back around like we had df. So it is, I would go up, curve around, and then sharp turn. This straight line here is actually a little bit steeper than our slant line, because our slant on runs through the rest of the letter like this. I don't tend to join this one out because it's already a lot going on. But again, it's up to you, you can do. That's our g. Now, our capital hatreds quite a unique letter. It's pretty much the only letter that we take our pen off the table and we do another stroke, but that's determined horizontal wise. Whereas with the f, we do take our pen off to create these different strokes. It's all separated vertically. We have our guidelines here, it's horizontally. So judging distance between these two lines is critical because if you have it too narrow or too wide, the whole letter is going to start looking a little bit weird. This is just a matter of practice. I'm just doing loads and loads, making sure you're always refer back to the model letter to try and error until you get a width that looks correct. But everything else, it's fairly similar to what we had before. We've got the little wind-up down. So let's do letter. So we've got wind up, round down and loop, down and loop. So a couple of things to note here. Neither of these are actually exactly straight lines. They look almost straight. This is, this is always, this is always curving over to the left. Here is a curve here. And we'll just want, It's very, very, almost straight. But at the very top, we come in at a slight curve and then it straightens out. So just something to note here. We do wind up round. Into our letter and then we do a curve down, round, windup, little bit of a curve down around. So the slope of this line is roughly in line with our slight line. So we do that little curve at the top, but then it pulls back directly towards our body. Round. And around. Now we've got our eye. It's basically a loop all the way around. Now with this one that you don't have to. But a lot of the time when I'm writing, I do actually, it's not technically site it just below the baseline. And I feel like it helps me get a better wind up into the letter because otherwise, if I don't do that, it won't start directly on the baseline. It'll go a little bit above it, which doesn't look as elegant. So just to get that little bit better of a wind-up into that curve. And that's pretty much how it looks like. And of course, if you want to join it onto the next letter, a bit like the F We do, we do to get to the end of the letter, the sharp turn, and then that can go directly onto the next letter. R. J is a kind of a funny one. It takes a little bit of practice. So we start at the baseline and then we end up at the baseline. And then there should be an intersection that all three strokes, our start or end in this big long straight line here should all intersect roughly at the baseline. Doesn't have to be exactly, but you want to get it as close as you possibly can. This is a this is all my business. And this is a completely straight line all the way down along our slant line. So this is how we would go. So we start at the baseline all the way around, straight line, down, curve and around. And of course, because the area above the baseline is three rows high, this part is going to be bigger than our descender. So let's do a couple more. Round down, curve, up, round down, curve up or round down. And I curve. So always pay attention to your descender. Also, what I mean is sometimes in the past when I was learning an error I used to do was not doing such a sharp turn. So if you round it off too much, it won't look as good or sometimes around it and at the end do it, That's not quite right. You want an elegant, you want like an almost like a constant radius curve back up. So none of you don't want anything that kinda looks like this, that turn at the last minute or no, none of that stuff. Just doing a constant constant radius curve. That's one thing I would recommend to focus on. 13. Capital Letters - Part 3: Alright, moving on. K, L, M. Again, we've got our little loop. Pay for the windup round curve at the top straight down. Using the entire width of our rows. We want the top of our letters reaching the top and it touching the baseline. The center of our k is in the middle of the middle column. Keeping things elegant, curving all the way around. That's our k. Now really like writing the letter L is one of the most elegant capital letters. It's a continuous curve all the way around. One thing to know is it does actually dip below the baseline. I think traditionally, a lot of the white people are taught handwriting with capital L is it sits above the baseline, but no, this one eats, it, dips below it. So we start off at the top of our x-height, continues curving round a little loop, and then ends below the baseline. Nothing too crazy. Just curve. So it's constant curves, no harsh corners, nothing like this. It's as smooth as you can get it. All. Smooth curves. Smooth curves. So the letters like this, it really emphasizes why having that rhythm, speed, muscular movement is very, very important to get those smooth lines all the way through. Right? With our M. It's actually quite a technical shape. It's a lot going on here. Here. It doesn't really look like it, but there's a lot of things you want to focus on. So it starts off again with that little loop at the top that would wind up loop, windup, loop 123. Alright, so there's a couple of things you really want to notice here. As you can see here, the top of the curve starts here. And then we have our first arch, which is a little bit lower, and then our second arch, which is a little bit lower. So as you can see it, it does this. It slopes downwards, but it's very, very subtle. You can see here very clearly because I'm writing out a very big scale. But on normal writing, it shouldn't be like a dramatic slowed down. You should only just about notice it. So with this cursive writing, of course, everything is all about subtlety. Nothing too crazy. Just a little bit like a little goes a very long way. So that's one thing you really want to focus on. Let's do another one. So first arch is a bit lowered from the top. Second arch. Of course, another thing you want to notice what we talked about before, looking at the negative spaces. So it's very clear you want you on these and this area here to be a roughly equal width, curves at the top, our windup, and then of course, maintaining that slant. So let's, let's do another one. Down. Down. Maintain that slant. So what you don't want to do is start to mess things up. So e.g. if I do a small m, we do down and then you don't want to do is e.g. one down here and then one kind of doing this sometimes if you're writing cursive and you're going fast, it can start going out of shape. You really don't wanna do that. You want it to touch the baseline, maintain that salon. That's going back again to push, push, push, push, push, push, push, pull, pull directly towards our body, touches a baseline, then back around. Don't start getting into bad habits like this one. So once we mastered the m, the entropy, a piece of cake, It's basically the same thing, but a little bit simpler. All of the elements are exactly the same. So our loop, the loop round top of the actresses, a bit smaller, of course, because we've only got one arch. It's wider than either of the one arches on the M to maintain that same spacing and that's our end. So just a tiny little bit, as you can see, even on this big scale writing, it's only a tiny little bit down from the top of our scale. So very, very subtle. And a normal scale writing this would only be very small, like a couple of hands loop down. So what I've done is I've gone up along the exact same line, but it doesn't have to be, there can be variation to it with your m and your end. So if e.g. if you wanted to do a loopy loop like this, reach the bottom, do a small loop up. And then around. That's a possibility. You can have this loop here. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. If it's easier, if you think it looks better, experiment with both of them, absolutely fine. Or you can just mix them interchangeably to add a little bit of spice to your handwriting. And then we've got our, oh, it looks very simple and it's actually fairly hard to master because doing an oval, even a little bit out of shape can look a bit wonky. But if you've been doing our push, pull and oval exercises, this should be a piece of cake. Doing our little wind-up. Oval all the way around and around. So keeping a constant speed, not too slow, not too fast. Keeping it smooth, maintaining it that rhythm. And we have our OH 14. Capital Letters - Part 4: Right, So we're at the halfway mark, P, Q, R, S, T. So now a lot of these strokes should start looking fairly familiar. We sort of in the middle, the beginning of the P actually is identical to our B. We start off in the middle, up, straight down, along the slant line, backup, curve around, touch the top, loop around. And that's our p. Bit more of a normal speed. Oh, sorry, my pen going there. Up, down along the slant line, upkeep, know, separating until we're at least halfway up. And the peak more down, put, put into our body, separating P loop around. We've got our Q, which is another curvy letter that I quite like. We've got our windup with this one that you got to be careful. You don't want this windup to be too low. Otherwise, it starts looking like a two. We have our windup curving order way around another curve and then it goes below the bottom of the baseline. So doing a little winder, continuous curve. And then around with this second curve here, notice it extends a little bit beyond where our initial site of the letter is where our initial windup lupus. So that's something you want to keep in mind. Always keep looping. No abrupt turns. All loops. Here we go. We have our R, which has a lot of strokes with our p.sit with just an extra stroke at the bottom. So start off here, straight up, down, back up along the line. Because with keeping a consistent line, thinking about that, not getting, get lazy, using the full width of our columns, go all the way to the top and then back around to so remember, what you don't want to do is start missing, start missing top so you don't want to do, you don't want to do things where you started skipping top e.g. I. Do that again. So up, down, you don't want to do things where you miss the top go around, and then that's when the letter doesn't quite look right. You want to use the full-width, have these reference points. So touch to top here, touch top here, bottom and bottom. So that's how you maintain the correct proportions, whatever size you're writing. A lot of the time from people that haven't really learned how to do handwriting properly. If you asked him to write a double, triple four times the size, the handwriting goes completely out the window because they don't actually have a reference point. They've learned to write out one particular size just by trial and error, and that's it. But if you have these reference points, even if you write at a much, much bigger scale, you would still have these reference points. You would just, if it's, if it's a piece of paper, instead of having a reference point here, you would double it. So it will be, instead of three, it will be six. So all of those reference points will be the exact same proportion. So your handwriting should look exactly the same, whatever the size you're looking at, and that's what you really want to focus on. So moving on to our S, all the same things still apply. We solve for the base. This very first line here is at a steeper angle, then our slant line, it loops around, touches the base. And in this, we have a change of direction at the top of our x-height. This is how it would look like. Loop around top of the x-height, round, straight line. Loop around, around straight line. So keeping it flowing, keeping a smooth, so it stays elegant. Now, of course, absolutely doesn't matter if you go beyond the bottom of the baseline. If it feels like it helps you lead into the letter more. Absolutely no problem at all. In fact, a lot of the time I do prefer it because I feel like it's just naturally leads into the letter more. Instead of finding the baseline and then start and then doing a cold start there. That's just my personal preference. See how you feel. Now we've got our t And now as you can see, it's very, very similar to our F, just without the line. And the proportions are slightly different, but the philosophy and the strokes are pretty much identical. Sorting out the top, coming down around, change of direction, and then this loopy loop. Now the thing is here, this top part here, overall is sloping downwards a little bit. Just one thing to keep an eye off. It touches the top and the cross. Down around, change your direction. Loop and around, along the slant line, loop and around. Looping around. And that's pretty much it. 15. Capital Letters - Part 5: Right? Now coming along to our homestretch, moving on to our u. Now with this one, it is a very loopy shape, but it is also very, very technical because you need to maintain those curves here, here, but you also want to keep it within the slant line. Otherwise, it will look kinda funny. So let's just do one, see what we're talking about. So we start off here doing a loop, curving around, coming down and inserting the loop back up. And then we do an abrupt change and then around. So it's quite important to do a few things here actually. So when we do our looping, we do a very round curve here and we come down to this part has to come along the slant line. So if the salon, I had to come along the slant line. Once we round the middle here, we really do go to start thinking about turning back around. Otherwise, we won't have this curved section here will be a very abrupt loop that doesn't look right. And the other part here is this bit, we want this parallel to our slant line, but even more importantly, has to be parallel to this stroke here. If these two lines are not parallel, you're, you will start looking very weird indeed, and that's really not what you want. So let's do that again. So curve, round down, thinking about toning now up, making sure it's parallel up all the way to the top and then abruptly down curve and you can join onto the next letter or whatever. So that's how I would roughly look like. And of course, you don't want to make sure that you want to make sure this width isn't too big. So these are just a couple of things you want to focus on. Reference point touch here to the top, top, curved round to the bottom here. And it's very important once you get to here, you haven't actually finished the lecture yet. You have to touch the bottom of the baseline. Don't start getting lazy and then start coming up here. In eagerness to join your next letter. Finish each letter as it stands down, touch. And that's your, you know, your v is not that dissimilar to the UE except for the fact that we don't finish at the bottom. Now we finish at the very top. And of course, the bottom part is a lot sharper. But again, we do the same thing. We do our winding down. And that's it. Nothing really to focus on here is again, the slant line. I'm, neither of these lines are actually straight. They're all curving very, very slightly. It just makes it look a little bit more elegant. So loopy loop coming in, round up, down, round up. So this bit here is not sharp. I mean, it's a lot, lot sharper than the EU, but it's not, it's not triangle. It's, it's a sharp curve, I shall we say. Making sure we have nice little curve at the top, and that's our v. Now this is our w. I don't know why, but this is probably my favorite letter to write. I think it's very elegant, maybe because the fact that it has a mix of sharp lines as well as with curves. The unique thing about this one to notice, the top part actually penetrates above the top of our scale. So we've got three. So as we mentioned, we've got three rows here. So this is technically the w is the tallest of all of our capital letters. It actually does penetrate a little bit above. So that's something you want to focus on. But apart from that, we do a loop, curve around, down, Up, down, up, and then curve around like this. The key thing with this one is the width here and then the curvature of these two lines here. So if you want, you don't want them coming too much inwards or too much outwards, you want to COVID so that you look at, looking at these negative spaces here. They all look proportional. And that's really what you wanna do looking at these negative spaces. And in this width here, if you get a negative spaces, right? If you get this width here, you touched a reference points. That's all this letter is. Let's do a couple more. Round down, touch the base, down, up and curve. That's our w. I don't know about you, but I think it really ornate. And I just love writing this one, right from our favorite letter to probably my least favorite, I think, is generally just a very awkward shape to write in cursive. It's kind of weird, but to be fair, it's not very often we have to write a capital X, but still with allowing it to do it properly. So with this one is actually very similar to the x you would write in maths is to seize back-to-back. So we have our kind of loopy loop going in around the second loop here, which is a bit above our width, go around. And then touch the middle of this loop around using all of the space, make sure you touch the two x just in the middle. Like this. Now again, I will Y is actually very similar to our you, most of it's the same, but instead of looping around, we go straight down all the way along are slight line and incur backup. And then we intersect at the baseline With the loop, the loop going in as we've seen so many times before. Down looping around like we had an AU up, down all the way along the slant line curve intersect at the baseline. And that is our y curve. Loop. Down curve. Curve is our wife right now, last but not least. Right now, last but not least, moving on to our very last one, our letter Z. The X. It's not very commonly used at all, but it's a very elegant letter, as you can see, it's got some beautiful curves to it. So let's see how we would go about doing this. With loop for loop from the top, curve, it all the way around key perm and keep curving, go towards the baseline, many little curve here, down, curve and around. So that's our Zed. So that's a lot of curves. Once you get into a good rhythm, good pace, it feels really great to write this one. Because many loop curve, mini loop curve. So the key thing here is remembering to keep like a constant kind of curve all the way around here. The bottom is exactly the same thing, especially on that kind of exit stroke here along the top, you wanted to keep that constant radius, no abrupt changes in direction. The more constant you can keep your curves generally, the more elegant it looks. And that's pretty much it. Those are all of our capsule letters. You don't use these as much as the small letters, but there's so much more expensive. Just keep practices in them. What I like to do is when I started was to try and master each letter in turn with my existing handwriting. Just write as much as you can and then start off with say, wherever you use the mode to save it in a, start incorporating that once you're comfortable with it, go to B and so on. Always referring back to the model letters. I feel like every time I refer back to model letters, my handwriting gets a little bit better. I always noticed, like always subtle changes I can improve whether it's the curvature, whether it's the slant touching the baseline, any of these things. So then I'll go through the entire alphabet this way and then start back from the beginning, every so often, referring back to the letters. And if you keep doing that iterating over time and there's no way you won't improve. So, um, yeah, Just have fun with it and keep practicing and you'll get better visual. 16. Cursive Words Practice - Part 1: We looked at the small letters, capital letters, some drills. We can all string everything together, put it into practice, and actually write some longer. But we're going to start off with some repeating letters. So the key thing really is here is going back to our push-pull drills and our movements. So the key thing really is to note the order of what we focus on. Number one is movement, number two is touch, and finally, number three is formed. So what do you mean by all of that? So the movement, as we mentioned before, a combination movement. So part of it from my elbow with the really small letters, we can use a little bit of finger using that bit of both. What do we mean by touch? So touch means using a very light stroke on the up and the downstrokes, not applying any pressure at all and keeping it very, very light, very loose, very fluid. And number three, the final and last thing we focused on is formed. So don't over obsess on the exact shapes of what the letters look like as long as you get the movement correct and your touch correct, the form should start improving with time. So that's what we're going to focus on here. So let's do a couple of these. So we've got a couple of eyes and a couple of letters. So these are all just a small letters within our x-height. Key thing is here, just keeping it out. Rhythm up. I'm pulling back down towards a straight line back towards our body to retain a consistent slant. More of the same here with these ends. So that's roughly the speed you want to go out. You don't want to rush it. But you definitely don't wanna go too slow and start drawing it. And hyper focusing on the shapes, just getting the rhythm right. So a bit more with the m. And of course with this because we have the moving, we're using a combination of our fingers and our elbows whenever constricted for space. Whereas, if you remember we said before, if you're just using your fingers, if you were to plan side of your palm down and the right, you would be constructed after, say, the third M here. And that's really not what we want. So these don't take too long as you can see. It just takes a couple of seconds per line, but it just reinforces that muscle memory. Once you have that muscle memory, when you do, start incorporating, incorporating it into your own handwriting if you come a lot smoother and easier. Another thing here is to focus on is consistency. As long as you have everything that's consistent, you can make changes very, very easy. So e.g. if you're consistently slanting too much or too little, it's very easy to just make a small adjustment and everything will be fixed. Whereas if the letters are all over the place, that takes a lot more work. So you want to build on a solid foundation, having a very consistent style of writing from the outset. So you can do these drills with whatever you choose. It doesn't have to be a fountain pen or pencil. The pencil is fine. Gel pens are fine. You can't even do it with a biro. I wouldn't generally recommend borrows so much, not that there's anything wrong with them you can do if that's the only thing you have. But the problem with burrows or is just that it encourages you to put a bit of pressure to get it to write and to get the lines looking okay, which is the opposite of what we're going for. We want it to have a very light fluid motion. So use borrowers as a last resort. If you had the choice between a borrow and a pencil, I would always go a pencil. But of course, if you ask me if you have the choice, It's pretty much a no-brainer. I would always recommend buying a good fountain pen. Aside from the fact that they're just a joy to write with, it takes no pressure. A lot of these patients will just write on the weight of the pen itself. So e.g. if I just drag this along, along the weight of the pen itself, can you see it's making a very consistent line, so you'd literally need to apply it, no pressure, it will just write by itself, which is why they're such a joy to write with. And yet they're very, very smooth. So just incorporating different letters together, it's pretty much the same principle. It's always that same stroke, same movement, talking about that muscle memory. Pulling towards our body. That's why those push-pull exercises are so useful because it's just basically the core, the basis of this entire style. That's why I still do ovals and push polls to this day as often as I can. So each and every single one of these downstrokes on the eyes, on the m's, on the use it. It's right along that line towards our body. Remember what we were saying about adjusting for the correct slot? If you have all of your letters slanting in a consistent way, but you're just finding it too little or too less. Or you would then have to do is just to rotate the sheet left or right and that will correct your slant issues. And of course it's always the same thing in terms of your muscles. You're always pulling direct to your body. So you don't have to modify any of that muscle movement. Those push-pull Joe's always still apply. It's just the slides of the page that you're moving. Keeping a very, very light stroke. That's what we mean. If you look at the old manuals, they always advocate a very light touch, movement, touch form. And of course, if we have to write movement when cover the entire line without having to readjust. And in theory, you can write a very, very long letters without having the need to take your hand off the table. So when it comes to consistency, it's not just about the letters, it's also about how much you practice to a little bit of this. Every single day will do really, really big wonders. Generally, what I like to do when I'm doing practice like this, whether it's push-pull drills, whether it's working on a specific letter, anything. I like to actually listen to podcasts. So I can do two things at once and it's quite therapeutic actually. Remember a hyper obsess over your letters, what they look like. Just get it, Just get it done with the right movement, the right touch, and then with the forms later, if you're finding your letters are a little bit out of shape, you can just go through them later, make a mental note and fix it later. Don't obsess. During the writing. You can go back and compare it to the model letters. You can make an overall adjustment. That's how to do it. Right? Now, this next one is pretty fun actually. This is probably the, one of the most satisfying words to write in cursive minimum, it's pretty much all written with the same repeating stroke. We incorporated. All we've done here. The key thing is just to maintain that rhythm so we don't get wonky lines. With this one here. It's really important to accentuate why we need that muscular movement. I feel like if we weren't doing muscular movement, if we were just doing finger writing with a word like this, you would have to take your hand off the table at least once. To keeping that slot. We go minimum or more. It's a very relaxed back-and-forth motion. Remembering to let all the pen do your work. No pressure. Keeping your fingers loose, remembering that, not forgetting that. So remembering that lesson we were talking about hand, I'm holding the pen, know, putting a lot of pressure on your fingers, just keeping it loose, just so that the pen doesn't come out of your hands and you really don't need any force whatsoever. You pretty much just need to have your fingers in the right place. If you look, that's that's kinda the grip I'm having is very, very loose. Another thing to remember is if you feel like you're getting towards the edge of the page and you're having to come at an awkward position, you should never adjust your body position. Remember we had that writing zone. So if you're finding you're out of the writing zone, don't do weird things to adjust your body, your arm too weird angles. Always maintain those angles. We said at the beginning, the ninth degree writings on all of these things. Well, what you should always do is adjust the way your paper is, not your body. So you always maintain everything in an optimal angle, position, posture, everything. Right? That's it for these small letter ones. 17. Cursive Words Practice - Part 2: Let's have a look at our next set. Now we're incorporating some ascenders and descenders here, we've got our j's, B's, H's is pretty much more of the same. Keeping the slant down, keeping that rhythm, all of that stuff. Now of course, because began beyond the x-height now is key to remember to use all of these reference points. And of course, this middle row here is where our x-height is. Our A's are B's are always stays within these two lines. And then this is the extent of our ascenders and descenders. With foods obeys. It would come all the way to the top and then back towards the baseline here. And of course, if we go back to our model letters and remember the lessons from letters like JG, things like this, the descenders do not actually dip below the baseline as much as the ascenders go up. So whereas like with a B it touches the top, the j doesn't quite touch the bottom. Kinda like this. And i w, i w. Now of course, one thing to note is with our modal letters. We had the guidelines, we had the x-height and then we had two below, and then we had three above. It's not very clear where the x-height. And then we had three lines above 1123 and then tube-like B12. When it comes to actual handwriting, It's not set in stone that you have to maintain those exact ratios. It's more of a guide. So what that means is you want your ascenders here taller. These ascenders, the L, the top of the L, to be taller than how the, some of the Js. But it doesn't have to be three to two because once you get smaller, It's it's impossible to know if it's three-to-two. But as long as you know that if you wanted to scale up your handwriting, you do know what the exact ratios are. But at this level, it doesn't matter exactly what it is. As long as proportionally you maintain the same, doesn't have to be three to two as long as you proportionally remain the same. So e.g. you've got a level for the x-height. The top of the L is much taller than the x-height. And then the descenders on as tall, as low as the ascenders at all, you're good to go. So as we write with this is key, not to rush too much and let your letters go too much. One thing I always used to do and that's sometimes still do is if I rush too much, I tend to round the bottom of these letters, the j's and then the top of the bees, whereas it should be a little bit sharp and smooth. Don't rush days with the example of an L, Remember it's like part of an oval. And as you get to the top where you want to do is kinda slow down, don't maintain that speed, otherwise, it will just tend to round off. So slow down a little bit before you do the change in direction, that has helped me. So always be looking at your lectures, looking at thinking about how you can improve it. Don't just practice willy nilly. Just looking at always referring back to the model letters make matching it as close as you can while maintaining that movement. And our light touch. Now with a few more letters. Oh, the same principle. Once you get used to it, do the same thing with all this. So now that we're practicing with all of this, it will feel kind of weird, you know, the combination that the forearm movement in the finger movement, I think everybody will have a slightly different split of what they prefer. So e.g. some people might prefer a lot of finger writing for some people, doing the more of a elbow movement would be more comfortable. It really depends on you. So use these to experiment with that. Really don't care too much about the form right now is all about the movement. What you wanna do is first field get comfortable, so it doesn't feel weird, it doesn't feel awkward. And then you can really focus on the shapes. Because the issue is if you focus on the obsessing over the shapes too much, whereas the movements still feel very weird. It's very easy just to hit a plateau and not to improve. And then the other issue is you build in some bad habits. So I wouldn't really worry if your letters look a little out of shape or not quite where you want them to be, just really experiment with that movement. So even during these, if you feel like you're not getting a consistent salon, you can just do a couple of push polls just to get that, just to get that movement back, just to bring that muscle memory back into your arm and then you can come back to it. So you can do 1 234-567-8910. And it's basically just applying that to the left, the letters here. As you can see, that's really how is because that's exactly the same movement. So you can give that a try too. That's why you see a lot of like Master Penman before they do like a project or a bit of commission work, they're doing a ton of warm ups because that just primes immuno, even at that level of expertise, they still do these two prime, their muscles. And that's why starting out will help you so much. And I will help you to feel more comfortable like very, very quickly. Because that's this kind of speech. You're looking at 1 234-567-8910. Well, you don't want to do is just go to slowly and then obsessing over every time you don't want to gonna do anything, you don't want to do that. This kind of speed that because yeah, you're not a handwriting anymore. This becomes drawing and our lives are different, our slopes different. It's, it's not what we want. And you want to try different things. So what I mean is e.g. with 11 line, you might want to just do your forearm movement just to really reintegrate that or really drive the point home. So like no, no finger at all. See how that feels. You know, just just doing a forum one. See how that feels. And then you can do a couple more with a little bit more finger movement. See how that feels too. And then you do another one where maybe you want to really focus on a very, very light stroke, not worrying about anything else. So if we move on just one focusing on a very, very light stroke, if, let's say if you have a tendency to dig into the page which I've seen some people do. And then you start noticing like markings on the page below. You might want to do a line where you really focus on just keeping a very light grip. Literally as light as you can, using just the way of the pen. While I find that when you're learning, when you break it all down into each separate individual components and welcome those separately. And then later on, things can start coming together. Whereas if you're learning everything at once, it can be a bit much play around with different things. We talked about the slam thing before. Remembering our posture. Don't forget that our writings on all of these things it's a lot to focus on. So yeah, I think I'm breaking it down to can be extremely, very helpful. Then once you do have that, I'm going back and trying to put all the different things together. Remember, is normal for it to feel a little bit unnatural because we're learning a lot of skills at once and we're putting a lot of different things together. So just take it step-by-step. And that's it. These are our modal words. With these ones, what I would recommend is incorporating it as part of your normal writing routine. So what I mean is that is probably not a good idea just to go through them all and then forget about it. What I like to do is do a couple of exercises and then go about writing your normal things. So whether it's journaling, writing out quotes, writing out shopping lists, do that for a while and then come back to it. And then so if you do that sporadically and spread it out over weeks, months, whatever. If you keep revisiting these, you'll notice different things that you can apply to your handwriting. You find sometimes your handwriting would go and then you can refer back to these and then re-integrate it. Whereas if you just do everything at once and then forget about it, you lose a lot of the lessons. So that's what I'd like to do, is called spaced repetition. And it helps you really absorb those lessons over time. It becomes much more effective, but that's it. Give it a shot. 18. Basics and Things to Watch Out For: So those really are the basics. From now. It's really just a process of practicing those basics. And once you get all of those mastered, everything clicks into place and it should make a big, big difference in the long run. E.g. are doing those push-pull Joe's and those oval drills. They look really, really trivial. But it's something I still do to this day. It makes such a huge difference. I wouldn't say you have to do those every single day or before every handwriting session, but I'd say at least do them a couple of times a week. And it doesn't have to be even long to 2 min push-pull drills, 2 min over drills just before my handwriting session, just to get that muscle memory bag, that movement, that back-and-forth motion, you'd be really surprised how well that warms you up and then that primes your handwriting. Similar to a lot of other stuff in life. It isn't really about learning more and more complicated techniques. But going right back to the basics and doing those core basic things really, really well will pay dividends in terms of practice to really remember the order of things we want to focus on. And this is coming from the handwriting masters of old, going back to the 1800s or the very top of the list. Number one is movement, and number two is touch. And once you have those two things down, number three, finally, then you focus on improving your form. When we talk about movement, what we mean is using the correct muscles and writing at the correct speed, not so slow so that you are drawing the letters. But we also don't want to rush either. Having a sweet spot right in-between. With touch, we really, really want to focus on keeping our strokes very, very light, as light as we can. Lend me the pen, do all of the work that's on our upstrokes, downstrokes, ovals, everything. And this is where we can actually incorporate and practice a lot in our job is to push, pull and the oval drills. So that's why they're so powerful. You get to practice your slant. So all of your letters slant at the right angle, but also practicing your touch you so you're making sure you're not putting too much pressure on the pen, just holding it with as little pressure as you can and doing those strokes, letting the weight of the pen just glide across the page. I mostly have those two things. The very final thing we work on is to form at the beginning. We're not too worried about the shape of our letters, but rather the movement and the touch. Once you get those two things down, everything should very easily fall into place. With regards to your form, it's all about setting a solid foundation because if we specifically drill down, what exactly should we look for in our day-to-day handwriting to make sure we make improvements all the time. And that's really it. And even more important than all of the technical stuff, one of the biggest predictors of how much someone is likely to stick with a hobby or even accelerated is how much fun they having is what it's all about at the end of the day. So really have fun with it. It helps you relax. It's so much more as well. 19. Final Thoughts: Great stuff. You made it. Congratulations for getting all the way to the end. We really learned quite a bit here. We learn the correct way to hold a pen, the correct posture, slant angles, different letters. We learned an entire new way to use our muscles and incorporate that into our handwriting. Which over time, if you put it all together, is really going to transform your writing. So the important thing now really is to practice and remembering that nothing comes overnight. There's so much we went through in this class and to piece everything together. Just for an example, we learned an entire new movement with our muscles. Not alone. It's gonna take a little bit of getting used to remember not to feel frustrated if it all feels weird and counter-intuitive at first, that's completely normal, but give me some time and a lot of it will feel like second nature. It's not a quick process to piece it all together, but it's not a sprint. But if we treat it more like a marathon, because we're picking up a lifelong skill that will stick with us forever. Plus the process itself of seeing your handwriting transform in front of your very eyes. It's a fun process. So that's pretty much it. But don't worry, you're not going to be left all out on your own. Don't be a stranger. One of the greatest things about this hobby of handwriting and fountain pens is how wholesome the entire community is. Now that you've taken the time and dedication to complete an entire class like this one. Definitely part of that community. So this isn't goodbye. This is just the start. Myself and people in the community are rooting for you. I'd love to stay in touch and hear from you. I have a newsletter where I share my thoughts, upcoming projects and Favorite Things that are released every single week. But I'm also very active on TikTok, where I'm trying to do an upcoming live series or handwriting practice, where runs through quite writing drills. A lot of the stuff we've already been through in this course, so we can all practice, learn, and improve together. And I would love to see you there. And if you have any questions, of course, feel free to drop me a DM on Instagram, e-mail anytime at all. As always, have fun and enjoy.